


A You and Me House

by cereal



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 13:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hes taken wandering, late-night walks around the TARDIS lately, walks that take him down the corridor that contains Roses room with increasing frequency. Hes just checking, he tells himself, just seeing if this had all been nothing but a product of forgetfulness and shes gone back to keeping her door shut at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A You and Me House

**Author's Note:**

> Written (finally!) for the [TARDIS ficathon](http://tardisficathon.tumblr.com/). My prompt was "tree house," from [shinyopals](http://shinyopals.tumblr.com). Title from I'm From Barcelona's "Treehouse."
> 
> * * *

It's an altogether distracting habit, made all the more flustering by the fact that he can't figure out when it started.

Instead, it's something he notices one night, walking back to the console room from the galley, half-eaten sandwich in hand. He'd gotten turned around, running calculations in his head, and ended up in the hallway that housed the companion living quarters.

This hallway usually requires forethought to get to, deliberately out of the way and unlikely to be stumbled upon -- sleepy humans and their need for nights away from the whims and desires of chatty Time Lords and all that.

(Or, well, one particular Time Lord and his one particular desire to do things with one particular sleepy human that would make him sleepy, too.)

But he's here now and he might as well continue on. If he turns around, there's no telling where he'll end up. Instead, he keeps his pace down the hall, forcing his mind not to wander again as he walks.

"You gonna share that?" Rose's voice is clear, if not a little tired, as it echoes through the corridor.

Turning to his left, he can see right into her room, where she's lying on her bed in her pajamas. Propped up by pillows, she's facing the telly, and, by extension, the door.

The _open_ door.

"Hadn't planned on it," he says, around a mouthful of bread and cheese. It's certainly not a thing he's going to let alarm him visibly -- Rose and her open bedroom door and her pajamas.

After all, it's only a tiny thing, one that flies in the face of literally hundreds of years of anecdotal intelligence about human companionship and human privacy needs. It's only _that_.

Rose straightens her posture, and he can see a lump form under the duvet where she's moved to sit cross-legged.

"Can you be persuaded to?"

He looks at the sandwich in his hand, trying to decide if he's particularly attached to it (he's not) and if he can, in fact, be persuaded to share with Rose (he can, he always, _always_ can).

Swallowing the bite in his mouth, he shrugs. "Sure."

He extends his arm so that only his hand and the sandwich cross the threshold into her room. The rest of him remains firmly in the corridor, where he belongs when Rose is in her jim-jams and supposed to be sleeping. "Here you go."

She tilts her head, raising her eyebrows at him. "Really? Whatever you're doing at --" she pauses to look at the small digital clock on her bedside table, the one that's basically a whoopee cushion for all its usefulness in a time machine "-- 3 a.m. is so important you can't take an extra six steps to just hand it to me?"

Glancing from the sandwich, to Rose, to the floor between her door and bed, he relents with a sigh, crossing the room until he's standing close enough to reach her.

In point of fact, it takes _nine_ steps.

"Here," he says, trying not to notice the way the smell of Rose is overwhelming here in her room. "You know, It's not actually 3 a.m. for me. I have a lot of very important business to take care of every time you go to sleep."

She grabs the sandwich from him with a wide grin, crumbs falling to dust her duvet as she peels the bread apart to check that there's nothing unseemly resting on the cheese. When there's not, she nods happily.

"Right, right, very important business," she says. "I'll let you get on with that." She gestures back to the open door, indicating he's free to go.

Somehow, in Rose's hands, the sandwich he'd found to be a little bit bland suddenly looks extremely appetizing.

"What? And give over the rest of my snack? We said _share_ , not _surrender entirely_."

She looks down at the sandwich, the corner missing and a cartoonish version of a bite mark ringing the remaining bread.

"You already had some," she says.

"Yeah, and I'm gonna have more."

She shrugs. "All right, but I'm staying here, so you can either stay, or shuttle the sandwich back every time it's my turn."

With that, she takes a bite, overlapping right over the part he's already eaten without any apparent care for Time Lord germs or sandwich symmetry.

There's something playing on the telly in the background, he can hear the faint sounds of people arguing, the clatter of chairs, but instead he watches her chew.

She hands the sandwich back and, since the damage has already been done, he bites again from the same area.

There's a peculiar sort of intimacy to sharing a snack this way, and it's certainly not helped by the thin vest Rose is wearing, and the bra she's clearly not, but there's also a peculiar sort of intimacy to frequent life-and-death situations, decontamination showers, and leaving one's bedroom door open during the night, so he lets it slide.

(In a place where "slide" means "feels slightly giddy about and will probably think about later, laid out under the console.")

Anyway, they're comfortable with each other and, actually, _not_ intimate, so there should be no harm in this sort of thing. Just one more notch on the dial, right?

Not tempting fate in the slightest.

&&.

Three weeks later, fate falls for the bait. There's been a series of open door encounters, in fact, nothing _but_ open door encounters. Now that he's paying attention, it's not only her bedroom door she leaves open, it's -- save the loo -- _every_ door, and she does it with such a nonchalance that he's sure it's been going on for much, much longer than he could've guessed.

Her hand never even lifts to doors, she just breezes in and out of rooms as if she belongs in them. Which, apparently, she does, because the TARDIS isn't in the habit of allowing doors to stay open. There's energy required to keep rooms in correct, constantly perceptible dimensions, and she's not usually keen to expend it, but for Rose, well...it's all there, all open and -- and -- and _visible_.

What's not visible, right now, is Rose. He'd seen her walking toward this corridor a few minutes ago, decided he could use an extra set of hands to help stabilize things during TARDIS maintenance (or an extra set of ears to narrate to), and set off to look for her.

But there's only one door in this hallway and, while it _is_ open, Rose is nowhere in sight. Instead, he's greeted with the trunk of a large tree only a handful of steps from the doorway.

There are plenty of reasons a room in the TARDIS would have a large tree, and he can't be bothered to think of them all right now. He wants to find Rose, finish the repairs, and maybe take a quick trip somewhere for a slice of pie.

"Rose, what do you think of pie?" He crosses into the room and raises his voice, not entirely sure of her location respective to the tree. There's a blanket of grass underneath his feet, green and soft and, for all he knows, it could stretch for miles.

"I like pie," she says from somewhere above him. "Wait, savory or sweet?" Her voice is still floating above him, but it's getting closer, mixed with the dull, muffled sound of light footsteps. "That last trip to Mum's did me in, I don't want anything with meat in right now."

He tilts his head back, eyes lifting toward a ceiling that looks more like sky, and catches sight of a large tree house perched in the branches of the tree. Rose moves to sit on the edge, legs dangling through slats of the small fence that surrounds the tree house's patio.

"I was thinking something with apples," he tells her, and takes a step closer to the tree. Rose's legs immediately stop swinging, her posture going slightly rigid.

On instinct, he rocks back to his original position and Rose relaxes.

"Apples sounds good," she says. "Something with a crumbly top, too, yeah? Like that place in America."

She's beaming down at him -- possibly exaggeratedly -- and he shuffles forward again. This time her eyes widen in panic and she shifts nearly imperceptibly to the side.

Is there something in the tree house he's not supposed to see? Because, truth be told, that makes him want to see it about a thousand times more.

"Right, yeah," he says carefully, now more interested in watching Rose than the conversation, "exactly like that, with those big glasses of milk."

Rose is scooting along the edge of the patio on her bum gradually, bit by bit, getting closer and closer to where the small wooden door to the tree house is ajar. He can just barely see her hand as she slips it along the wood, fingers scrabbling to pull the door shut from the bottom.

She gets it closed and visibly deflates, tension draining from her shoulders. "Still can't believe you drank that whole glass, that was disgusting."

He scoffs. "No more disgusting than you laughing so hard it came out your nose."

With slow, deliberate steps he treads even closer to the tree trunk, hands within reaching distance of the strips of wood nailed into it to serve as the ladder.

Rose has moved so she can see him through the hole in the floor that serves as entrance to the patio. Her eyes peer down on him cautiously as he lifts a foot to the first piece of wood.

She's fidgeting like she wants to tell him to stop, teeth worrying at the corner of her thumbnail, when he speaks again.

"That was embarrassing, wasn't it?" He raises his eyebrows, tilting his head to catch her eye. His hands raise to grip a higher rung and he pulls himself up until both feet are off the ground. "Probably one of the most embarrassing things you've ever done -- milk shooting from your nose. Can't really imagine anything more embarrassing than that."

He's pouring it on extra thick as he casts a purposeful glance at the closed tree house door, mind tumbling through all the things that could be lurking beyond it.

In a TARDIS that's full of open doors, this closed one has become incredibly alluring. What could be behind it? Something private, something intimate, something she doesn't want him to see? Or something she doesn't want _anyone_ to see? And _why_?

He's taken wandering, late-night walks around the TARDIS lately, walks that take him down the corridor that contains Rose's room with increasing frequency. He's just checking, he tells himself, just seeing if this had all been nothing but a product of forgetfulness and she's gone back to keeping her door shut at night.

Every night though, it's still open, the dim hallway lighting barely illuminating her as she sleeps. She looks so vulnerable like that, so completely exposed, that he can't imagine what she _would_ feel self-conscious about.

If she's willing to let him see her like that, he can't fathom what could possibly be behind the tree house door that has her so uncomfortable.

Although, now that he thinks about it, it _is_ possible the open door thing isn't about him.

Sure, yes, if forced, he's willing to admit that as a tiny, _tiny_ possibility.

"Oh, I've been loads more embarrassed than that before," Rose tells him, eying him as he pulls himself up another step. "Shot milk out of my nose in front of my whole class once."

"Really? How old were you?" He takes another step. There's only a couple left now and he'll be in the tree house.

She shrugs, the movement big and demonstrative and placing her more firmly as a barricade in front of the closed door. "Couldn't have been more than 13."

He nods, but it's reflexive. The closer he gets to the tree house and its secrets, the faster his hearts beat.

Last step, he's so close, can just about pull himself up...

"Actually!" Rose's voice is _loud_ , "I could probably still do it, right on demand on everything. Let's go to the kitchen, get some milk and find out."

She shuffles quickly to the hole in the patio, swinging her legs down so that they dangle near his head.

"C'mon," she says. "Shift, let's go."

There's a split second where he considers letting it go, hopping back down the ladder and forgetting about all this over some milk. He knows he's being an arsehole, probing at something she doesn't want him to see, it's just -- he wants her to want him to see it. Whatever it is.

They've already got this one giant, pink, sexy elephant dancing in the corner of the room, they don't need another one.

Or the _elephant_ isn't sexy, it's a _metaphor_ for sex, or there's no metaphor and no elephant and they're not having sex and why can't that be the only thing they don't have?

Why does there have to be _more_ things walled off to him?

"Nah," he says, freeing a hand from the ladder to tap her on the knee. "The milk will keep. Show me what's in this tree house of yours."

Could that be a metaphor for sex, too? Rose's "tree house?" He might like it to be, if she's offering.

"It's not my tree house," she mumbles, refusing to shift her legs.

"Well, of course it's not," he says. "It's in _my_ TARDIS, so it's _my_ tree house."

The step his feet are on loosens the slightest bit, just enough to set him scrambling for a firmer grip.

"Or, I guess, the TARDIS built the tree house, so it's _hers_ ," he recovers. It's never clear if it's the TARDIS playing tricks or a guilty conscience that sets these things on him, and he's found it's better to play it safe. "Anyway, you discovered it, you're in charge of giving the grand tour."

Reluctantly Rose pulls her legs back up, letting him hoist himself through the entrance and onto the patio.

"This is the tree," she says, pointing at the greenery above their heads.

"That was the ladder," she points down at the rungs on the trunk.

"This is the patio," she gestures around them.

"And that is the tree house," she finishes with a thumb toward the closed door, making no move to open it. "Sorted now?"

He makes a big show of inspecting all the elements, lips pursed and turned down in appraisal.

"And the interior? Is it spacious? Maybe, oh, I don't know... _bigger on the inside_?" He waggles his eyebrows.

She takes a quick step away from him, back pressing up against the door.

"No," she says firmly. "It's sort of cluttered. We shouldn't go in there."

It's not necessarily more information than he had minutes ago. He'd already speculated that there was something behind the door, had frankly become a little obsessed with it, but now it seems more real. Rose confirmed there's something back there, and he desperately needs to know what it is.

The TARDIS doesn't clutter things up on her own, it's always the work of a Time Lord or a human, shuttling things into rooms, or shifting them around, or asking for them, and this -- this cluttered tree house -- it seems to be the work of Rose.

"Cluttered with what?" There's a small window in the side of the tree house, but it's been boarded up. He squints at it anyway, trying to imagine what lies beyond it.

"Nothing...just...stuff," she says, back to chewing on her thumbnail.

"Well, which is it? Nothing? Or _stuff_?" He gives her his most syrupy smile, a Time Lord angel with a very dirty halo.

Her nostrils flare as her heel suddenly connects with the floor, stomping in anger. "It's stuff, all right? It's _my_ stuff!"

He recoils, taking a large step back from her as he puts his hands in front of his body, palms out.

"Sorry," he says quickly, moving to tug at his ear. "Only -- don't you have a room for your stuff?"

As quickly as it arrived, her anger retreats, leaving her to sigh and drop her head forward in resignation, speaking more to the floor than him. "Yeah, but you come in there sometimes."

Again, it's what he suspected, what he _knew_ , that whatever's in there, she doesn't want him to see it, but it's a hollow victory to have that part confirmed.

"And I don't come in here?"

She shakes her head. "You haven't before, you _never_ have."

He moves back toward her again, hand rising to tentatively touch her arm. "And you...come in here a lot? Where you know I don't go?"

Maybe this is about more than _stuff_ , maybe it's about him, maybe he's smothering her, gotten too close, maybe --

"It's only so you won't laugh," she says and tilts her head to meet his eyes.

What? What would he... "Rose, what would I laugh about?"

Her eyes flit to the hand still on her arm and she takes a deep breath.

"Stupid human stuff," she says. "Sort of embarrassing."

He can't figure it out, any of it. Stupid human stuff that she hides behind doors in tree houses? Something embarrassing, so he was on the right track before --  is it -- oh, _ohhhhhhh_.

He lowers his voice to a whisper. "Are your tampons back there?"

For a split second, he feels confident he's gotten it right.

Then Rose bursts into laughter.

She laughs.

And laughs.

And laughs.

When she finally resurfaces, she's wiping tears from her eyes and clutching at her stomach.

"Oh, god, Doctor, no," she says, still chuckling. "That was great, ta, but no, it's not my _tampons_."

Before he can process it, she's pointing a finger at him in accusation. "And anyway, what's embarrassing about tampons? Not like I can control that, you know! If _you're_ embarrassed about them, that's _your_ problem and --"

His hands are back up in surrender. "No, no, no, no, _I_ don't think they're embarrassing, I think they're great! Lovely things, tampons, soft and absorbent and, and, and, useful. I just thought, you know, sometimes human are embarrassed about them, and that's silly, to be embarrassed, that's the silly part, so --"

She rolls her eyes, cutting him off.

"All right," she says, exasperated. "But if you laugh, I _do_ have plenty of tampons, and I'll shove 'em right up your nose."

Her hands reaches for the tree house door, pushing slightly and causing it swing open.

Without thought, he slams his eyes shut tight. "No, Rose, really, if you don't want me to see, I won't look."

Her hand wraps around his, tugging him forward. He feels the door frame brush his arm and that's it then, the only closed door on the TARDIS, and he's gone and made her open it.

"It's fine, Doctor," she says, squeezing his hand. "Really, you can open your eyes."

He exhales loudly and opens his eyes. It's slightly dimmer in the tree house, but his eyes adjust quickly.

It's...them. Everywhere he looks, it's _them_.

Not literally, of course, but there, in every available corner, in small piles and stacks, on tables and in boxes, _them_.

Memories from all their adventures one right after the other, curated like some sort of Doctor and Rose museum.

Chip wrappers and stolen staff badges, handfuls of sweets and foreign money, photos of the two of them, muddy, useless trainers, ruined neckties, there's so much _stuff_ and she was so _wrong_ \-- it's not silly at all.

It's _wonderful_.

"Rose," his voice comes out on a breath, the awe he's feeling coursing through him and lighting him up. "This is brilliant."

Her fingers reach to fiddle with a stack of holodisks, turning them a few times, before glancing up at him. "Really? You don't think it's stupid?"

His eyes are still tracing the items in the room, trying to place each one, remember each trip, what Rose was wearing, who threatened them that time.

"No, I don't think it's --" he stops, runs a hand through his hair, and tries to organize his thoughts. "-- Why would I think it's stupid? Why...why would you hide this?"

She shrugs, fingers ringing the edges of the holodisks once more. "It's sort of human, isn't it, remembering like this? You don't have the sort of...emotions I do."

Ducking his head to catch her eye, he debates only for a moment before reaching to still her hand on the disks. What has he done to her? What sort of -- probably correct -- image of his people has he painted that she thinks of him as some sort of unfeeling whirlwind?

"I have some very human emotions where you're concerned, Rose," he says, and it's true, it's _too_ true, true in ways he shows her every day and true in ways he never will.

"But you don't, you know, live in the past," she says. "We're always on to the next thing."

He drops his hand from hers, gesturing to the side and trying for distraction. "That's not true! We lived in the past just last Tuesday, remember? The roaring '20s with a real lion? We had those --"

She cuts her eyes toward him, leveling a look that stops him right in his tracks. Whatever ramble he was about to start on, it's over now.

"No," she says. "Don't do that. Don't make it a joke. I mean it." She scrubs her hands over her face, like the conversation is already wearying her.

"I'd watch matches all the time with Mickey, yeah? Down at the pub, we'd sit and we'd watch the whole thing, and as soon as it was over, they'd start analysing it on the telly, what went wrong, what went right. And me and Mickey, we'd stay for all that, too, and I asked him why we had to -- god, I asked him that a lot -- and he used to tell me because it made the victory that much sweeter, talking about it like that. And sometimes his team lost, and then he said it was to learn from the mistakes they'd made. Like it was up to Mickey, right? Like it mattered if Mickey knew the mistakes."

The Doctor's stomach is twisting unpleasantly. Whatever he'd anticipated from all of this -- the open doors, and the secret tree house, and the goading Rose -- it certainly hadn't been this.

"You want me to be more like Mickey?" He says, his voice flat. It's missing the point, but deliberately, and he's almost certain she's not going to let him get away with it.

She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, Doctor, I want you to be more like Mickey. Please put away the time and space machine and stop showing me all the stuff in life I've been missing. What I'd really fancy is a life on the estate and lager that tastes like piss."

Glancing off his shoulder lightly, she walks by him to the door of the tree house and takes a seat on the patio. Her back is to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her and feet nearly touching the railing.

He slides down next to her, his taller build pushing his trainers out between the slats. They dangle in the air like her legs were earlier, before he'd forced her to show him inside.

"Sorry," he says.

"For which part?"

A quick tug at his ear and he glances at her sheepishly. "All of it?"

There's a noisy, exaggerated sigh that causes her lips to flutter and then her shoulders slump. "It's fine," she says. "Just...why couldn't you let me have this one thing?"

There's not a single answer he can think of that doesn't make him sound extremely selfish. And he _is_ quite selfish, sometimes, but it's not going to do him any favors here, pointing that out, and instead he shrugs.

"I don't know," he says.

"You don't know why you pestered me into showing you my secret tampon room? Just thought, 'oh, all time travel is getting boring, might as well make Rose show me the only thing she's ever not shared with me?'"

Well, would you look at that -- Rose is plenty good at filling in the gaps on this particular round of 'The Doctor is a Wanker' all on her own, doesn't seem to matter what he says. In that case, should probably dig the hole a little deeper, really make sure he can never escape.

"Not the _only_ thing," he says, somewhat petulantly.

Her eyes widen and she wheels on him. "Doctor, if this is about the loo or something, I'm not ever gonna do that -- we're not ever gonna do that."

His own expression shifts to mimic hers, with a little horror thrown in. "What? _What_? No. I don't want to...share the loo with you. I mean, we can share a loo, but not share what we do in there. I meant that you have your...romantic life. You don't share that with me."

Oh, god, she's laughing at him again.

"In what universe -- and remember how many we can visit -- do you not already have my romantic life? What's some bloke gonna do? Take me to the cinema? You took me to the cinema on _Neptune_." She laughs again. "Oh, Doctor, you gotta admit, you've ruined me romantically. Sunsets where _five_ suns are setting, in bloody different colors? That's more romance than the movies themselves have got!"

His arms cross of their own volition, chin tucking down to his chest. Well, of course when she puts it like that, they're romantic, but that's not what he meant.

Her giggles trail off and she looks at him expectantly.

"We don't do...other romantic things," he defends. "Physically romantic things."

She grabs his hand to hold it, then raises them both in front of his face, twisting them back and forth. "All the time with the hands. All. The. Time."

He raises his eyebrows, because if he's not allowed to be obtuse, neither is she.

"Oh, all right," she says. "But whose fault is that? It's not me stopping us from having a snog, that's for sure."

On Pogulan Prime there's a word for the exact noise he makes in response. In English, it's something between a cough and a sputter.

"What? Did you think I hadn't noticed? Really, Doctor, it doesn't bother me. You have your things, I have --" she glances back ruefully at the tree house, "-- _had_ mine."

There's a blooming of heat in his chest, embarrassment and desire warring for space between his hearts. It's not _entirely_ true -- that the lack of snogging is a "thing" for him, but it's true enough, and he's more than a little surprised to be talking about it out in the open.

It's fostering a freeing sort of bravery. If they've come this far, what's the harm in going a little farther? One more closed door opened to join the others.

He turns his body to face her more fully, his shoulder now pressed to the wall of the tree house instead of his back. "That's not very fair, is it? Should we even it up?"

She mirrors his posture, but looks confused, eyebrows scrunching down as she says, "What?"

"I'll give up one of my things, since you gave up one of yours," he says.

Realization slips across her face and there's a flicker of excitement, a Christmas morning look that promises exactly what you've asked for, if you can just get the paper off.

He expands in that look, fills up on it, uses it to push beyond all the parts of him screaming that he's doing a ridiculous and ill-advised thing.

And then it disappears.

The look, the hopeful, beautiful, lovely look, the expression that had shown him a future he hadn't dared think too much about before, is gone. In its place is a fierce and hardened sort of sorrow.

"No," she says. "No, I don't want that."

The heat in his veins is a different sort now and it threatens to overwhelm him. 

He's, oh god, he's _embarrassed_ , this isn't milk-shooting-from-your-nose embarrassment, this isn't starkers on the first day of school, this is misreading everything up to and including the current conversation, this is making such a tremendous fool of yourself that you'll think about it for centuries -- literally centuries -- and your guts will turn and your face will flush, and oh, _oh_ , she's still talking.

"I don't want it to be some pity thing or a trade or a game," she continues. "I want it to be proper, a real thing that we both mean."

He's a complex being, infinitely complex even, capable of world-saving grace and bravery or shameful and horrific evils, but really, typically, he favors about four different speeds, four different patterns, personalities, routines, behaviors and, right now, he feels none of them are sufficient.

This is...not exactly _untrod_ ground, but fairly new ground, ground he could get lost in, ground he doesn't remember very well and, oh, really, sod it all, he wants to kiss Rose, he's always wanted to kiss Rose, and now they're _talking_ about kissing and he is too busy _thinking_ and not doing, and what if he just...what if he said --

"I'd mean it."

She physically responds, her body jerking slightly in surprise as she catches his eye. "What?"

He knows she heard him, but he repeats himself anyway, letting her buy the time to process his words.

"I'd mean it," he says again. "If we snogged, I'd mean it."

She looks guarded now, analytical, like she's searching for the trap. " _If_ we did? But we won't, right? Just reassuring Rose, making sure she doesn't feel bad about something that will never happen anyway."

It's suddenly tiring, this conversation, humans and the ways they sometimes think, and he's on thin enough ice with his own fragile instincts as is, he certainly doesn't need to be stomping around, testing them, taunting them not to run this time.

"If, when, now, later, frequently, once, only on special occasions, never in front of your mother -- I'll take whatever you want to give," he says.

Rose licks her lips, scooting back on her bum to put more space between them. Not a lot, but enough that she can get a good look at him, which she does, for a long time. Eyes roving over every bit of him, checking for inaccuracies or something. When she's finally done, she meets his eye again. 

"This is you, then? The real you? And you're not taking the piss and you're not running away and you're not going to regret it?"

He nods his head slowly, clearly, making no confusion about his answer. And if he sticks to nodding, doesn't try to open his mouth, nothing can come galloping out in front of the confirmation instead. There'll be nothing about how a part of him does still want to run. There'll be no admission that he can't say anything for sure about regrets because he's regretted a lot of things that seemed like a great idea in the moment. 

Because even for all of that, all his typical horseshit and hang ups, he _does_ mean it and, if she wants, he _is_ going to kiss her. Or _they_ are going to kiss. Or _she_ is going to kiss _him_. He's not fussed about the pronouns. 

"OK," she says, the word coming out on a breath as she shifts back closer to him. 

This is, truth be told, not at all how this was supposed to go, if it were going to go. He's not oblivious enough to his own flaws to never imagine that there'd be a moment when he broke, gave in, let it happen. 

But he always assumed, logically, that it'd be under some great duress, some universe-threatening day and some monumental shift, something full of adrenaline and hormones and frantic energy.

Instead sitting in a quiet tree house, on a day that might as well be a Tuesday for all its excitement, the both of them talking about it before it happened, all parties clear-eyed and mentally accounted for…it's unexpected, to say the least.

"OK," he agrees.

"Should we just…" Rose tilts her head to one side and then the other, hands fluttering above his shoulders and then around his jaw without landing. 

He tips his chin forward and tries to match her movements, his own hands landing rather formally on her waist. 

"Here's, let's try this --" He rises to his knees and urges her to follow him, so that they end up kneeling, facing each other. 

His hands curl into the cotton of her t-shirt and he edges forward a little bit as Rose's eyes fall shut. The distance between their mouths seems so great and he can't figure out how to cross it. Should he lean in? Say something else? Wait for Rose to move again?

She smells amazing and she's warm and she's Rose and he wants to be kissing her already, doesn't want to have to think about the getting there. Nearly everything good in his life hasn't been planned, and what they're doing here, this planning something that should be very good indeed, seems wrong. 

Rose's eyes open again after a moment, focusing on him still hovering in front of her. Her shoulders slump.

"This isn't us, is it?" She sounds sad and he rushes to fix it.

"It could be -- Rose, you have to know I'm serious -- I _want_ it to be," he says. "But we need to make it feel more like us. Rush right into it, laugh in the face of danger, chase you into your tree house and make you show me your secrets. Reckless and impulsive and the stuff of legend --"

Rose grins widely, cutting him off. "The tree house! Come on," she says tugging him up and through the door again. 

"All this stuff, all these moments," she gestures around the room, "I see at least four different times I wanted to kiss you. Let's pretend we're there, you find one for you, too."

It takes him less than a second, every piece of debris in the whole room calling up at least 50 different scenarios he'd have snogged her in, were he a different man. But now he _is_ that man, and before another second can pass, he's got a hand on her cheek and he's leaning down to kiss her. 

Her arms wind around his neck in an instant, pulling him in the rest of the way as their mouths meet. Her lips are soft and dry against his and he wants to slow everything down and speed everything up as he settles his free hand on her waist. 

She pushes closer to him, mouth pliant against his and then the hands in his hair are tilting his head slightly, changing the angle so that his bottom lip fits between the two of hers. She presses a kiss to it, light suction and a little bit wet and on instinct he returns the gesture, retreating and advancing in a string of kisses. She chases his mouth and he chases hers and it's brilliant, it's amazing, it's clearly not going to be enough. 

In a flood of need, he darts his tongue out to lick at her lips. It's only a split second, only in passing in between a gap in the kiss, but it's enough for her to feel it, enough to get her opening her mouth, meeting his tongue with her own, tangling and slipping, everything wet and warm and moving. 

Neither of them can stand still, his hands, somehow now both on her waist, slide to her back, then her lower back, his fingers shifting the hem of her shirt until he finds skin.

Her hands tangle in his hair, tugging and combing, directing the kiss and making him mental in all the best ways, as her tongue continues to work alongside his. 

There's teeth, too, a few light nips at lips that are quickly chased away by wetness and heat and Rose tastes a little bit like biscuits, but mostly like human saliva and, oh, he'd buy biscuits in that flavor right now, he really would.

It's hard to imagine her any closer to him, but she finds a way, pressing her chest to his as she rocks even further up on tiptoe. It's a precarious position, clearly without balance for her and, though he could steady her just fine from her back or her hips, he slips his hands to her arse instead, supporting her from the bottom as they continue snogging like teenagers.

She steadies herself even further with a hand around the back of his neck, fingers curling into the skin there in a way that makes him shudder. She notices, he can tell, and as she pulls her lips from his, presumably to try his neck and her mouth this time, he moves quicker, pressing a series of kisses down the column of her throat. 

He varies the pressure, the wetness, the length, suction, a million variables all paired up differently until he's got her arching against him and clawing at his shoulders, breathy little whimpers escaping to land straight in his trousers. 

There's no leverage though, he can't get close enough to her with only air behind her, and instead he staggers them slowly across the tree house. Rose's back brushes up against the door and it swings under the force, their bodies rushing to fill the space as he moves to try and press her into the rough wood.

The noise as the door finally closes is loud and they both startle, breaking apart as his hearts thunder in his chest.

Rose looks up at him with wide eyes, an incredulous grin playing across her mouth. Her neck looks wet and red and he realizes, as the buzzing in his head subsides, that it's because of him. Because of his mouth, because they just did _that_.

Without even trying to force it down, he lets a laugh bubble up out of him, and soon Rose is laughing, too, twin happy smiles as they take each other in. Her shirt is rumpled and her hair is a mess, her mouth is swollen and her chest is rising and falling with exertion. 

Finally her laughter trails off in a smile, her head tipping back to rest against the door. She rolls it back and forth a few times, eyes fixed on him.

"I can't believe we just did that," she says. 

He clears his throat, because the talking about something, and the doing something, those are areas he's mostly comfortable with, but -- as this entire tree house is a testament to -- the aftermath play-by-play is…not his strong suit. 

Before he can stammer out a reply, Rose is rolling her eyes good-naturedly.

"I know, I know, I get it," she says. She pushes up off the door and bring her hands to the top of his shirt, swiftly unknotting his tie. She slips it out from under his collar and he swallows at the feel of her hands near his neck again. 

With a quick step out from in front of him, she squats down in the corner of the tree house, clearing a space among the bric-a-brac. She glances up at him with a smile, and then folds the tie up before setting it down in the space she's cleared. 

She'll remember this, she's telling him, and since he's allowed in here now, since he's knows about it at all, he can remember it, too. 

And he will -- he'll remember, and he'll do it some more. It's just going to take some getting used to. 

Rose rises back to her feet and navigates around him as she reaches for tree house door. 

"Come on," she says. "Let's go get that pie."

He follows her out the door and then squats to follow her down the ladder, only realizing at the last second that he hadn't closed the door behind him.

He stands back up and moves to shut it, but from down the ladder Rose calls to him.

"No," she says. "You can leave it open."

* * *


End file.
